Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [88]
Dutifully Irv set about answering the Four Questions. He looked around the table, at which sat three native Koreans, a converted Baptist, a badly lapsed Methodist, and a Catholic of questionable but tormented stripe, lifted his Haggadah, and began, unironically, “Once we were slaves in Egypt…” James Leer sat with his eyes fixed on Irv’s gesticulating right hand, his head not quite motionless on his neck, listening to the remainder of Irv’s response with the universal bogus solemnity of drunken young men trying to pay attention to something that is making no impression at all. After this we read in turn about the Four Sons, those poor ill-assorted siblings, one self-righteous, one dull-witted, one an asshole, one infantile—try to guess which one fell to me—who year after year got criticized and compared with one another in a way that I supposed had provided a useful example to Jewish parents for centuries. Next came the long retelling of the sad, operatic, but as far as I could see typical history of the Jews in Egypt, from the miraculous feats of Joseph to the slaying of Hebrew babies. Generally it was somewhere around this point that I began to engage in a little Passover reclining of my own. I sat back, closed my eyes, and felt myself drifting, abandoned and alone, in a little wicker basket on a broad muddy river, in the shadow of the murmuring bulrushes. Egypt was the expanse of lapis lazuli passing overhead, the grunt of a crocodile, the wind-chime laughter of a princess and her handmaids playing on the shore. I felt a sharp pain in my left side and my eyes snapped open. James had jabbed me in the ribs.
“My turn to read?” I said.
“If you don’t mind,” said Irv, dryly, looking annoyed. I looked around the table at my wife and her family. Stoned again, their faces said. Then Irv’s crocodile stomach growled, long and irritably, and everyone laughed. “Maybe we had better speed this up.”
So Irv hurried us through the Ten Plagues and the eating of the various recondite matzoh sandwiches. A second glass of wine was poured and blessed, and again, except for the ten drops that he spilled for the sake of those unlucky Egyptians, James knocked the whole thing back in one swallow, then gasped like a happy sailor.
“Have an egg,” said Irving, “have an egg.”
At last it was time to eat: As the rest of us set to work on the hard-boiled eggs, Irene, Marie, and Emily started to serve the first courses. First there were dense, cold slippery globules of gefilte fish, never one of my favorites. James conducted wary experiments on his own gray lump with a fork and the end of one finger and ignored all of Irv’s exhortations to dig in.
“It’s pike,” he explained, as if this were guaranteed to whet James’s appetite.
“Pike?”
“Bottom feeders,” Philly assured him. “God knows what they eat.”
Stealthily James interred the remainder of his fish in a grave of pink horseradish and then pushed his plate aside. He looked grateful to see the fragrant yellow bowl of matzoh ball soup when it arrived.
“So what are these a symbol of?” said James, poking at a matzoh ball with his spoon.
“What’s that?” said Irv.
“These things, and those gefilte fish things,” he said. “And the eggs, too. How come we’re supposed to eat so many little white balls?”
“’Cause that’s what Moses had,” said Philly.
“It’s possible it’s some sort of fertility symbol,” agreed Irv.
Deborah, said, “Well, it’s obviously not working for this family.” She looked at me, then away. “At least not for some people.”
“Deb, please,” said Emily, misinterpreting her sister’s remark as a reference to our years of failed attempts to conceive, which in the Warshaw family were generally attributed, I knew, to the effect on my sperm count of my years of pot smoking. If only they knew, I thought; but they would soon enough. “Let’s not—”
“Let’s not what?”
“None of this stuff is a symbol of anything, okay?” said Philly, waving an arm over the table, indicating the heaped platters and serving bowls that Irene